Common Student Question: What Does “Actively Looking for a Job” Mean?
Read Time: 3 Minutes
Author: James Tierney
Introduction
When first learning about labor market statistics, many believe any individual not working is considered unemployed in the official monthly release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It can be eye-opening to learn not only do individuals need to not be working but they also must be actively looking for a job.
My current position as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Penn State UP Economics Department gives me the opportunity to teach up to 1,000 intro to macroeconomics students a year. Every semester the same question comes up: “What does actively looking for a job mean?” I finally decided to go directly to the source to find out the best way to answer.
What Does Actively Looking for a Job Mean?
From the BLS Website:
People are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Actively looking for work may consist of any of the following activities:
Contacting:
-An employer directly or having a job interview
-A public or private employment agency
-Friends or relatives
-A school or university employment center
-Submitting resumes or filling out applications
-Placing or answering job advertisements
-Checking union or professional registers
-Some other means of active job searchPassive methods of job search do not have the potential to connect job seekers with potential employers and therefore do not qualify as active job search methods. Examples of passive methods include attending a job training program or course, or merely reading about job openings that are posted in newspapers or on the Internet.
Workers expecting to be recalled from temporary layoff are counted as unemployed whether or not they have engaged in a specific job seeking activity. In all other cases, the individual must have been engaged in at least one active job search activity in the 4 weeks preceding the interview and be available for work (except for temporary illness).
There you have it. Right from the metaphorical horse’s mouth (by the way, horses don’t count in the official numbers either). For some, this official unemployment rate definition is not a great way to measure the health of the labor market. Many think individuals working part-time or those who have given up looking for jobs should also be included. That’s a reasonable issue to have. I’ve responded to those concerns by relating the unemployment rate to statistics in baseball and showing how the BLS does have alternative measures of labor underutilization.
If you want to learn more about economic data and see how that data is represented on a graph, check out the YouTube video below:
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